As part of the annual mHealth Summit, this year NIH is offering an mHealth training institute. The event will be held Saturday, December 6, 2014 – Sunday, December 7, 2014. According to the website, “The mHealth Institute is designed to provide behavioral and social scientists tools to successfully add mobile health technologies to their research in a collaborative team environment with mentorship from leaders in the fields of engineering, medicine and the behavioral and social sciences.”

CarPlay by Apple is exciting but what if you are not in the market for a new car? There is now an alternative, Siri Remote. It is a Bluetooth device that contains a single button that you tap once and it patches you though your car’s hands-free function to iOS on your iPhone and activates Siri. It can be clipped onto the sun visor or dashboard. It is relatively inexpensive at $79. Sync once and no need to sync again, there is no on/off. With Siri, you can listen to and send texts, emails, social network updates, control music playback, make phone calls, schedule calendar events, input navigation queries. The only catch is that you need an internet connection to operate Siri. For some this could be a problem when on the move.
Check it out at www.drivewithsiri.com
Source: MacLife – August 2014

iPads and other tablets are becoming an integral part of daily clinical functioning. If you use your iPad in a hospital setting, it is important to consider that your technology can spread nosocomial infections. Well, there is an app for that.

deBac is a free iOS app that can can be used as an effective intervention to reduce microbial load. A recent study published in JMIR evaluated the application versus no disinfection process and demonstrated 2.7-fold (P=.000670) lower bacterial load on the devices used in the clinical environment that underwent a standardized daily disinfection routine.

The app is simple, it is a step-by-step interactive program that walks you through the decontamination process using isopropanol wipes. While that authors warn that this process may void your iPad warranty, they researched Apple’s recommendations for cleaning iOS devices. Apple warns against using cleaners or detergents but not specifically against alcohol wipes, so this remains an unresolved issue.

Some of the steps in the process:

Turn the device off before starting the cleaning process

Unplug all connectors from the device and remove all visible sating from the surface of the iPad

Put on chemical resistant gloves that are in accordance with the in-house policy

Using a slightly damp cleansing tissue, wipe the front of the deivce until the screen background has turned completely blue. Start at the top left corner. The cleaning processs has to take at least 10 seconds.

etc

The authors hope to inform clinicians and hospitals that the “normal use of tablet PCs leads to a remarkable amount of microbial surface contamination. Standardized surface disinfection with isopropanol wipes as guided by the application significantly reduces this microbial load when performed regularly.”

Funded by Kickstarter, Emotiv Insight is a 5 channel, wireless headset that monitors brain wave activity and translates it into understandable data. The goal of EMOTIV INSIGHT according to the company is to allow you to optimize your brain fitness & performance, measure and monitor your own or your family’s cognitive health & wellbeing, and develop amazing new applications.

The neuroheadset is the only device on the market to offer 5 EEG sensors and 2 reference sensors, which provides useful coverage of key sites around the cerebral cortex: frontal cortex (executive functions), parieto-temporal (auditory, spatial/co-ordination), and occipital (visual). This spatial resolution is crucial to getting high resolution EEG data that will allow you to receive more in depth information on your brain activity.

How many times per hour do you look at your phone. What if you could get paid for looking at your phone? Locket is a new Android application that will pay you to put advertising on your lock screen.

This free app puts ads for products, events, and coupons on the phone’s home screen, and allows the user to choose whether to engage with the ad, or ignore it and simply unlock their device as usual. Either way, you get paid.

Each swipe earns one cent with a maximum of three cents per hour. Every friend you recruit to Locket earns $1 extra toward your app piggy bank. Once you’ve accrued a few bucks, the app allows you to cash out, apply the funds to a gift card, or even donate the money to a charity. You can earn $262.80 over the course of a year, without referrals, as long as you unlock your phone screen three times per hour, 24 hours a day.

Advertisements are targeted to individual users based on geo-location data, their purchasing patterns, and mobile app usage. For now, the app is limited to eight brand partners, according to TechCrunch, but Locket will also run house ads to fill space. Locket has rejected advertisers hawking liquor and lingerie.

The beta version is available in the Google Play store. Hopefully, there will be an iOS version.

Tile is a crowdfunded startup company that has a clever idea. They will sell you a small square tile and you can place it on any object that you may want to find – like on your key ring, bicycle, pocketbook, etc. You can locate it using an iOS device. The Tile app tells you how close your are or you can even have your tile give you an audible tone to locate it.

What is quite interesting is that if you lost something, for example, your bicycle was stolen, you can potentially find it through the entire tile community near you. Others with tile, can relay the signal of the tile that you placed on your bike to your iOS device.

Tile has almost 16,000 backers and reached 4,298% of its goal. The goal was $20,000 and with a few more days of left, it has reached a funding level of $859,562.

Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry (aka Foxconn), the main manufacturer of Apple’s iPhones and iPads, recently showcased a smartwatch that can be connected wirelessly to an iPhone. In addition to notifying the user of email, messages, the wearable computing device can be used to measure the user’s vital signs such as respiration and heartbeat, as well as to check phone calls and Facebook posts.

The company’s wireless communications and medical research groups also plan to add new features such as fingerprint identification to the gadget in the future, to help securely record personal health data.

A new system being developed by MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science could give all of us the ability to spot people in different rooms using low-cost Wi-Fi technology. According to MIT Professor Dina Katabi, “We wanted to create a device that is low-power, portable and simple enough for anyone to use, to give people the ability to see through walls and closed doors,” Katabi says.

The system, called “Wi-Vi,” is based on a concept similar to radar and sonar imaging. But rather than using a band of the electromagnetic spectrum that is available only to the military, it transmits a low-power Wi-Fi signal and uses its reflections to track moving humans. It can do so even if the humans are in closed rooms or hiding behind a wall.

In a push to diagnose early Alzheimer’s and other dementias, primary care clinicians are being given iPads with CAMTAB’s mobile dementia screening test to administer to patients. It is a 10 minute test of “paired associates learning” or PAL test which is a visuo-spatial, culturaly unbiased test that is sensitive to dementia. University of Cambridge has spent 25 years validating PAL as a screening tool for dementia. Sorry, the App is not available outside of the UK as yet.